


The one where --

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marvel gets a multiverse.  Pacific Rim should, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The one with mutants.

**Author's Note:**

> [tielan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan) and I are running a challenge with each other, where one of us writes a blurb of at least 500 words, and the other one picks on a theme from the preceding story, and writes another blurb. She picked Mako/Raleigh as a general theme, but me, uh. You know me. What do I love even more than I ship Hot Dads? 
> 
> Pacific Rim alternate universes! 
> 
> This approach was totally inspired by kuro49's lovely [television!AU](http://archiveofourown.org/series/46356) series. Each chapter is a different universe, though I totally reserve the right to loop backwards.
> 
>  
> 
> **General disturbing content warning. If you are screening for triggers, this is probably not the fic for you.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prior Round: [The Meeting of Your Sparks](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1706240#work_endnotes)  
> Response: Raleigh is a kindergarten teacher, right? So what goes with Raleigh teaching at a school? Raleigh at a school for YOU KNOW. YOU KNOW.

Raleigh is twenty-two. Yancy is twenty-five, and they live in a trailer park thirty minutes from town. Is it a bad idea to drive home under the influence? Yes. Do they know better? Of course. Do either of them deserve what happens as a result? No. 

Yancy drives because Raleigh is even drunker than he is, and at dawn, an old man and his grandson leave to go beach combing. The grandson has his hand on the passenger's side door handle when he points, and the grandfather turns. A man is staggering down the road, disoriented, terrified, thirty-five miles from the crash site. His clothes are thick with frozen blood and ice; it's still snowing. 

Raleigh sobs his brother's name over and over and over. 

When the EMT's get him down, they find scars running up and down his left side that look like they healed a decade before. 

Within hours, the scars are gone. 

...

Mako is seven years old, and she wakes from one nightmare and falls into another. Everything is noise and fear and helplessness. Heavy furniture smashes into the walls. In the kitchen, a dozen knives rise out of a drawer and fly down the hallway. Mako's mother begs; Mako's father struggles to get to the phone and call for help, but Mako is in the grip of all-consuming terror. Why can't she wake up? Why won't someone wake her up? Where is her mother? Why isn't anyone helping her? 

She can't hear anything over the noise rising up out of her muscles, bones, and body. Voices fill her every part of her, and by the time the EMT's come, Masao Mori is dead. So is Sumako. A falling bookcase split the back of his skull. She bled out with a knife in her femoral artery and another in her brachial while trying to crawl to her daughter who was shrieking and sobbing for her. 

Hanging in the hallway is a child's blue coat with a pair of shiny, new red leather shoes lined up underneath: the Moris were scheduled to go to Tokyo in the morning to seek a specialist's advice for Masao's cancer. 

...

Mako is a powerful telekinetic with some telepathic ability. Both powers come to her early. 

Raleigh heals from wounds that would kill others: it doesn't manifest until he is twenty-two, kneeling in the snow next to his dying brother and saying, over and over, that he is sorry, this is his fault, he is sorry, he is so sorry. 

Mako and Raleigh are mutants with the X-gene. So is Chuck Hansen. So is Stacker Pentecost. So was Tamsin Sevier. 

...

Not everything tracks. Chuck Hansen can shoot percussive blasts from his eyes, and his father is a pilot. On the other hand, it's Angela Hansen who forms the Starjammers and leads them in battle against the tyranny of D'Ken, ruler of the Shi'ar empire. In contrast, Hercules Hansen has never been to space. He remains on Earth: his relationship with Chuck is very much the worse for it. 

Similarly, the leader of the X-men is English and male, but Stacker Pentecost is not Charles Xavier. He has the use of his legs. On the other hand, he is not white. He is not rich. His education came courtesy of a court-ordered military reform school, followed by two years preparing to become an Anglican priest, then a career in the RAF. No Oxford. No doctoral degree. His accent is rough and full of Tottenham and places of learning where the outside fences are topped with razor wire. When people look at him, how many see a boy from the council estates who made something of himself, rather than someone of inherent value and worth? 

To fund the School for Gifted Youngsters, Stacker pulls together funding from different sources -- a five year project with the CDC to study the health of mutant children, a social work grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to work with troubled mutant youth. Money from Dr. Lars Gottlieb dries up after Stacker tells him that he isn't interested in a cure for being a mutant. 

Tamsin Sevier was a telepath who felt her lover, Luna Pentecost, die at the hands of an anti-mutant mob. Tamsin used a wheelchair; Dr. Caitlin Lightcap built Cerebro for her. 

Stacker Pentecost didn't need matches to burn down the club where his father was murdered. 

...

"Where would you rather die?" Stacker asks, bluntly. 

Equally bluntly, Raleigh says that he isn't sure that he even _can_. He gets on the chopper with Stacker anyways, and across the hallway, before he closes the door --

...

"I'm not going to hold back," Raleigh says. He brings out his claws. 

"Then neither will I," Mako says and levitates from the ground. 


	2. The one with ghost drifting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prior round: [Don't Reach for the Moon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1798702) by tielan

In some universes, the Breach never opens. 

In some universes, kaiju never come through the Breach.

...

In this universe, there is a Breach, and kaiju come through it. In this universe, humanity builds Jaegers to fight them, and in this universe, one night, Raleigh Becket and his older brother wake to news that the Category-III LOCCENT has been tracking for two weeks slipped past the Gage twins in the storm. The kaiju is moving surprisingly fast for its size; LOCCENT is having difficulty tracking it in heavy weather, and the Beckets are being sent out not to fight, but to defend Anchorage and keep the kaiju from making landfall. Ideally, after the storm clears, LOCCENT will get a better fix on the kaiju; Romeo Blue's exhausted pilots will be battle-ready again, and the Jaegers can engage the kaiju with a two-to-one numerical advantage and air support. 

Instead of waiting, though, instead of following Stacker Pentecost's instructions, Yancy and Raleigh go to sea. Partially, it is because they are young and cocky. Yancy is a few years older than Raleigh, and he warns his brother against cockiness, but in the end, they young. When have the Becket boys ever lost against something they fought together? 

At the same time, the Beckets are local boys, Anchorage born and bred. They have friends who work on boats in the Cook Inlet fisheries. They have extended family on the boats. They've both worked in processing plants for salmon, and Yancy spent one exhausting, smelly, highly remunerative summer as a deckhand on a salmon boat during a good run. 

The order comes down from Pentecost, and Raleigh looks at his brother. 

"That's cold," Raleigh says. Yancy agrees. 

...

On the other hand, going after the boat means that instead of having a two to one advantage, instead of meeting the kaiju in clear conditions at ground of their choosing on the continental shelf, Gipsy Danger fights the biggest kaiju on record in stormy waters in January, alone, with minimal support from LOCCENT and no air support. 

In this universe, they fight Knifehead alone, and instead of ripping the right side of Gipsy Danger open, Knifehead drives its horn into the Jaeger's side. It pushes the Jaeger down into the cold, cold water of the Bering Sea in January: the waves are over thirty feet high. Visibility is very, very low. 

Still: Gipsy Danger rises again: Raleigh kills the kaiju. Raleigh takes the weight of the Jaeger onto his shoulders and soul. 

Then, Raleigh walks thirty-five miles back to shore. 

...

 _Yancy --_ he says to LOCCENT, in the middle of a burst of static fuzz. _Yancy --_

Each time he does it, LOCCENT tells him to stay put. Reserve your strength, Tendo says. Let the storm pass. Choppers will come and get you

 _Yan --_ Static. 

_Ranger, your brother is dead,_ Stacker says, finally, taking the conn from Tendo. _You cannot save him. You are damaging yourself and your Jaeger. Stop. That's an_ order. 

Raleigh doesn't listen. Why should he? He and Yancy disobeyed one order already that night, and Yancy feels alive to him. He can feel Yancy in his head. He can feel Yancy in his heart. He can feel Yancy in the Drift with him. When he looks over at Yancy's cradle -- 

...

In another universe, fear and guilt and grief carry Raleigh back to shore. In this universe, hope drives him hard and fast. It takes beyond the limits of human endurance: Raleigh burns himself out trying to get his dead brother back to safety. There is a body; there is residual neural feedback enabling the Drift. Raleigh is convinced that he can save Yancy if only he gets them back to shore fast enough. The suits have basic life support. The suits are technological marvels, sealing small cuts to keep them from bleeding, pumping oxygen in low-O environments. For brief periods of time, they work as dry suits, keeping pilots alive in water cold enough to stop human hearts. 

The Drift is science so advanced that it looks like magic. Feels like life. 

...

In this universe, Raleigh gets back to shore an hour and a half faster than he does in any other universe where Knifehead does serious damage to their Jaeger: the sky is still dark. Storm clouds are still blowing away, and there is a brief, clear moment without snow, only wind and waves and the cold of Anchorage in January. 

In this universe, Pitfall is something that Raleigh sees at a very great distance while heavily medicated in his private room at an excellent long-term care facility paid for partially by Stacker Pentecost out of his own pocket after the UN cut PPDC funding, partially by an anonymous local donor who remembers, even if nobody else does, that before the Becket boys became the poster children for everything that was wrong with the PPDC and the Shatterdomes -- arrogance, cockiness, glory chasers who only obeyed orders when it suited them -- before that, they were heroes. Before they were heroes, they were local boys. 

...

Yancy Becket is dead in many universes, but Raleigh Becket only gets a chance to redeem himself in certain ones. 

Treasure them.


End file.
